There are so many Linux distributions to choose from! What is the "best" linux flavor for a web hosting environment running primarily: Apache HTTP, Tomcat or JBoss, MySQL and Alfresco (not necessarily all in the same instance).
Are there any significant differences in terms of ease of administration and configuration, performance and stability for such applications, etc.?
What would you recommend?
Thanks! Mike
No, not really.
It is really more down to the packages you install than the distribution you run.
For stability people always recommend Cent OS because it's the poor mans RHE (as in it's basically RHE but free-as-in-beer)
They all use similar tools to administer things like webmin, and sshd.
What are you more familiar with. Red Hat based systems(fedora, mandriva) or Debian based systems(Ubuntu). This family divide will determine a few things. First rpm packaging vs deb packaging.
You also want to look at the level of activity of the project. Mandriva and Ubuntu are two examples of active distributions. That try to keep up with current releases of software.
Other than that most stuff performs with little difference.
I've generally been fine with plain old Debian (Ubuntu has its caveats that sometimes hit you at wrong times). Granted it requires a bit of configuration upfront but once there, its stable as anything. I generally don't use repositories unless they're very general stuff but rather compile things myself from the deb packages. It gives a bit more control over what you really want to do with your system and you can optimize to a certain extent. Currently, I'm running Tomcat 6 on Debian for some months without any big problems.
However, I think the debian family is much more friendly to implement even things that you don't really have much idea on or if you want to implement something fast or if you're trying out something in the site. In an ideal world, I'd do testing in a different machine or chroot, but hey I'm just a lazy sysadmin at times :)
You also might want to consider OpenSolaris, as it is from the same company which developed Java in the first place and I've heard rumours, that it supports threading better than Linux does and in Java threads are quite important.
I've been playing with a complete Sun stack and it seems to be working well so far.
I deploy .war files developed in Groovy with Grails but there are more and more options for deploying PHP and Ruby solutions. If cost is important, Sun is getting very aggressive partnering with hosting companies to provide free hosting for one year. I haven't had many obstacles but sometimes I have to look up command syntax since I hadn't used Solaris before.
It depends entirely on what tools (particularly commercial) you're using. Most Linux stuff is shipped for RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux) so you are usually best off using that. Centos is a free distribution based on RHEL (in fact it's almost identical) so a given vendor's stuff usually works the same there.
It also depends on hardware support. If you're using (for example) Dell servers, they support RHEL, but probably not e.g. Ubuntu so you really want to use a distro which is supported by your hardware vendor or their tools may not work.
It's not a case of "best" for hosting web applications, but for use in a commercial hosted environment. We use Centos so we can use RHEL stuff.